Don't think that a tutor is only needed by struggling students.
Additional help may be needed even if the child is an excellent student – for example, if he or she needs to catch up on material missed due to absences or prepare for admission.
If you are faced with such a need, the following tips will help you choose a good English tutor.
1. You must make sure that the person you contact has the appropriate education: he or she can be either a teacher or a translator.
Give preference to specialists who graduated from a specialized language university, but on the contrary, it is not at all necessary to look for a native speaker.
Even though such a person naturally has excellent knowledge of the language, this does not make him a good teacher.
2. Don't be shy about asking your tutor to show you his certificates.
First of all, you should be concerned about the language level certificate – not lower than B2 for primary school and not lower than C1 if the child is studying in middle or high school.
Also, the tutor must have teaching certificates that confirm that he can work with students.
If we talk about “primary school”, then this is TKT, CELT-P, while CELT-S is needed for teaching in secondary school.
3. The last thing you should be interested in is whether the tutor knows how to find an approach to the student.
A tutor working with younger students must be able to engage their student in the subject, while parents of teenagers should make sure that the teacher can find a common language with their child and motivate them to learn a foreign language.
Author: Elena Shimanovskaya